Reply #126: I honestly disagree [View All]

[LeftishBrit]

I think that socialism has as much in common with communism (in the sense that the term is generally used politically) as Christianity has with the Inquisition, or Islam with the Taliban. Most Communist states have been quasi-theocracies, where, as with religion in other theocracies, socialism has been distorted into a rigidly, tyrannically imposed doctrine. The leaders become all-powerful, the representatives of ultimate Virtue as well as temporal power, and dissent is stifled. Realism is sacrificed to ideology, and in the end equality is usually also sacrificed to privilege for apparatchiks.

But socialism as such, applied flexibly, without tyranny, and with a 'mixed economy' that gives a role to private ownership, has generally worked rather well IMO: e.g. pre-Thatcher Britain, especially under Attlee, and some Scandinavian countries nowadays.